Look North's Amy Garcia on life in lockdown, rearing chickens and why the media is so important right now

The BBC Look North presenter takes up the story. “My car broke down a couple of months ago near York and it happened to be next to a field. I noticed there were some chickens spilling out into the road and I thought I’d better tell the farmer. I found him and he told me they were fine, that they were free range and were happy roaming around. We got to talking and before I knew it I’d agreed to hatch some eggs for him.”

She promptly forgot about it until he sent her a text message saying he was going to drop some eggs off on her doorstep. “With all that was going on I hadn’t even mentioned it to my husband. He said ‘what’s this?’ And I said, ‘ah, yes, we’ve got 30 eggs to hatch.’ When they hatched it happened to be a day when I was really busy at work so my husband was left to hatch them all.”

In the end, 17 eggs hatched and the farmer took some back to his farm leaving Amy and her family with the rest. “We’ve now got seven chickens and the children have become very attached to them. They are the most pampered chickens you will ever meet... I even caught my husband blow drying one after it had fallen in some water,” she says, laughing.

“It’s double the workload because everything is on you, so you have to be across everything and do the interviews as well. But I’m enjoying the challenge and behind the scenes it’s a real team effort.”

Most working environments have changed dramatically in recent months and it’s no different in the world of TV news. “Normally you would have all the camera operators whereas now it’s just you and a floor manager. We don’t have guests in the studio and interviews are done through Skype, so the whole way we work has changed,” she says.

“We’ve got producers putting programmes together from their kitchen tables. Then for those of us with children there’s that added challenge of trying to get a balance between the work life and home life.”

Amy now lives in York with her songwriting husband, Tim, and their young family, though her early stomping ground was Wakefield. Her mother Yvonne and Spanish father Jesus ran a curtain business in the city where she attended Kettlethorpe High School and Wakefield College.

Her route into television journalism was not a conventional one. She studied media and performing arts and then answered an advert in Stage magazine for a children’s television presenter, and got the job, moving to London when she was 19. She stayed in children’s television for the next four years, working on S Club TV as well as CBBC and the Disney Channel. “I started in children’s TV and my first programme was with Holly Willoughby and Ben Barnes.”

Children’s presenters often have a short shelf life though, so she took a sideways step into property and lifestyle programmes.

She seemed to be carving out a successful career in that field until, at the age of 27, she packed it all in and went back into education, taking an MA in broadcast journalism.

"It was something I always wanted to do and then the recession hit and everything I was working on got axed and I thought I could feel sorry for myself or I could turn it into something positive.”

She landed her first job as a reporter on Look North before going to work on BBC South Today. She returned to Yorkshire (and Look North) in 2013, when she joined Harry Gration as one of the programme’s two main presenters and since then has become a popular figure with viewers.

Amy believes the role of the media is hugely important, particularly at the moment amid so much fear and uncertainty. “We have a big responsibility and I think it’s important that we do keep getting the stories out there, regardless of how challenging it is. I think it’s especially important in regional news, because people turn to you for comfort and information and they’re relying on us more than ever,” she says.

“I think our job is to reflect what people are going through, whether that’s families struggling with home-schooling, or those working on the front line. It’s important that these personal stories are told as well the heart-warming ones that remind us that we’re all in this together – because there are people out there doing some really wonderful things.

“We’ve had stories about people making scrubs for workers on the front line and volunteers turning their hand to delivering food parcels, and we need these stories because I think we all need to feel uplifted at times, and that’s something that regional news, both newspapers and television, does really well.”

She admits that trying to juggle both a demanding job and looking after a family is difficult at the best of times, never mind in the midst of a global pandemic. “Initially my reaction with my family was ‘right, we need to get a routine in place and the children need to be learning this and that’, and it lasted about a week and I realised it wasn’t going to happen. And now we’re all these weeks in and we’re lucky if we get an hour’s schoolwork from my daughter in the morning.”

It’s something she’s relaxed about, though. “I think we need to take the pressure off ourselves a bit and accept that these are really unusual times and we’ve just got to get through them and try and make the people around us feel as happy and as safe as possible.

“I’m really fortunate that I’ve got a husband at home who can share that with me, I’ve got a job that I love and a garden where I can go for a bit of escape, and I know many people don’t have that.”

The past couple of months have, as she says, been an “emotional rollercoaster” for us all and the hope is we may be through the worst of it. “I think like many people I’m looking forward to being able to give my mum a hug and having a drink with friends, those simple things that we take for granted.”